Community (A Modest Proposal)

[Terry Reedy]

On 6/14/2010 3:07 AM, rantingrick wrote:

> Sorry Terry -- with all the noise here the very few "quality" signals
> just seem to be lost on my "auditory cortex".

I think you will be both happier and more productive if you train 
yourself to pay more attention to signal and let noise go by.

>   We are at once lucky to have a built in editor

It is certainly a boon to someone like me who now only programs in 
Python and had no experience, let alone commitment to any of the current 
alternative.

> Some peeves:
>   The tabs in the shell and four spaces in the editor is just complete
> nonsense! The fact that the shell does not insert a "... "
> continuation is a real nuance!

1. I agree.
2. This does not much affect me since I do not directly enter compound 
statement with more than, say, 2 lines in the body, even with the 
command window interpreter. I much prefer a full screen editor.

 > The constant "zombie" processes requiring explicit kills via task manager
 >  are quite annoying

There was a thread about this a few months ago. As I reported then, 
there is only a problem (for me, at least) when one severs the 
connection to the background process with control-C. Since I almost 
never need to do that except when testing ;-), this is not a problem.

As I believe I also reported then, a third process is started each time 
one hit RUN F5 from an edit window, but the old background process goes 
away in about 4 seconds. No need to kill it.

> Not to mention the fact
> that a file dialog, replace dialog, or find dialog can lose focus and
> drop to the bottom of the window stack faster than Obama's approval
> ratings after BP takes a leak!

I have not noticed this.

>   One feature i would like to create is an ability to redo the last
> command. Pressing an F* key should return you to the last block for
> editing. Why have a traceback clutter up the output when you made a
> simple little mistake? I hate to have a shell just cluttered with
> exceptions. Also the ability to clear the buffer and maybe also remove
> *all* exceptions might be an added bonus for our "tidy" minded
> friends.

I agree that the interactive shell could me make more useful.

>   But digging a bit deeper... not only is the UI awful, but the code
> itself is just awful. That may be the reason why i start to fix it,
> get frustrated, and then shortly after quit.

When I tried to read the IDLE code with an eye to helping with patches, 
I got lost in the setup code before I even got to the tk gui code. So I 
can easily imagine that it might be better organized to be more easily 
read and maintained. Perhaps I will try again some time.

Terry Jan Reedy